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I love Bayesian modeling. Not only because it allows me to model interesting phenomena and learn about the world I live in. But because it’s part of a broader epistemological framework that confronts me with deep questions — how do you make decisions under uncertainty? How do you communicate risk and uncertainty? What does being rational even mean?
Thankfully, Gerd Gigerenzer is there to help us navigate these fascinating topics. Gerd is the Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy of the University of Potsdam, Germany.
Also Director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, he is a former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Law of the University of Virginia.
Gerd has written numerous awarded articles and books, including Risk Savvy, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, Rationality for Mortals, and How to Stay Smart in a Smart World.
As you’ll hear, Gerd has trained U.S. federal judges, German physicians, and top managers to make better decisions under uncertainty.
But Gerd is also a banjo player, has won a medal in Judo, and loves scuba diving, skiing, and, above all, reading.
Our theme music is « Good Bayesian », by Baba Brinkman (feat MC Lars and Mega Ran). Check out his awesome work at https://bababrinkman.com/ !
Thank you to my Patrons for making this episode possible!
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Links from the show:
Abstract
by Christoph Bamberg
In this episode, we have no other than Gerd Gigerenzer on the show, an expert in decision making, rationality and communicating risk and probabilities.
Gerd is a trained psychologist and worked at a number of distinguished institutes like the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin or the University of Chicago. He is director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy in Potsdam.
One of his many topics of study are heuristics, a term often misunderstood, as he explains. We talk about the role of heuristics in a world of uncertainty, how it interacts with analysis and how it relates to intuition.
Another major topic of his work and this episode are natural frequencies and how they are a more natural way than conditional probabilities to express information such as the probability of having cancer after a positive screening.
Gerd studied the usefulness of natural frequencies in practice and contributed to them being taught in high school in Bavaria, Germany, as an important tool to navigate the real world.
In general, Gerd is passionate about not only researching these topics but also seeing them applied outside of academia. He taught thousands of medical doctors how to understand and communicate statistics and also worked on a number of economical decision making scenarios.
In the end we discuss the benefits of simpler models for complex, uncertain situations, as for example in the case of predicting flu seasons.
Transcript
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